In another lifetime, I interviewed celebrities for glossy luxury magazines and a few newspapers. This was before the Great Recession, the rise of internet advertising (and influencers), and venture capitalists cored out much of print publishing as an industry; thanks to full-page liquor ads and subscriptions, there was still enough editorial budget to send you cross-country a few times per quarter, all in a quest to pry something new out of famous people who’d been telling the same stories to the same venues for the past twenty years.
This was a job subject to odd flukes. At one point, I was dispatched to L.A. to interview a comedian who, at the time, starred in big comedies and sold out Madison Square Garden. There was just one problem, which didn’t come to light until I checked into my hotel near LAX: the Bigshot Famous Comedian had recently returned from a USO tour in western Iraq, during which a tooth had become infected. While he was recovering from an extraction and high as a proverbial kite on painkillers, his handlers refused to let me near him, no matter how much my editor screamed at them from his desk in New York.
I was expected to chill out—expenses paid, of course—until someone in the ether of PR, celebrity assistants, and magazine editors made a decisive move. I decided to do my best imitation of a Michael Mann character, cruising the nighttime freeways, ending up in dives that usually featured some combination of cheap drinks, mechanical bulls, Christmas lights, and fried food. Along the way, I collided with freelance writers and photographers on their own assignments, plus the movie and TV people who keep the creative firmament spinning, from personal assistants to the lighting guys.
When I finally got my 30 minutes with the Bigshot Famous Comedian, we ended up lying on a tarmac at Van Nuys Airport, where the accompanying cover shoot was taking place, while he talked about his father. Some stars never lower their shields; others treat you as their psychiatrist. Just as long as I got enough good quotes to soothe my editor’s skyrocketing blood pressure, I didn’t care.
That wasn’t the first or last time an assignment flew off the rails. But smooth or rough, they all shared something in common: people talked. Whether waiting with a photo crew for a celebrity chef to climb from a private jet, or sharing drinks with a couple of blasted-out junior PR reps after they wrangled a nightmare fashion shoot, the pauses between events would inevitably lead to folks offering up stories from their position in the celebrity orbit—and the more hilarious or heartbreaking, the better.
Because I’m a writer, I later wrote down many of these tales in the Moleskine notebooks I used to always carry around, but I wasn’t really tempted to use many as narrative fuel until I started writing “Where the Bones Lie,” my mystery novel about a Hollywood fixer who teams up with the daughter of a famous smuggler to solve a long-dormant missing-person case. That fixer, Dash Fuller, is burned out from years of helping bury Hollywood’s worst secrets. He drinks too much, his nerves are shot, and when the book begins, he’s exhibiting that number-one sign of hitting bottom: he’s trying his hand at standup comedy.
It’s always a delicate thing to weave real-life events into fiction. Sometimes you want the readers to recognize your allusion to whatever happened in the past. In other instances, you’re just using those experiences to give your writing an added boost of verisimilitude. Plus, there’s always the omnipresent fear that surfacing something controversial will get you into trouble—you start wondering whether that little disclaimer in the front matter of most novels, the one about any resemblance to real people being purely coincidental, would actually hold up under legal scrutiny. I feel like my fears of blowback are valid, considering an Oscar winner once threatened to break my legs if I ever revealed [redacted] in print.
I bet he’d do it, too. He’s older at this point, but still stunningly strong.
With all of that in mind, how many Hollywood stories did I weave into “Where the Bones Lie”? There’s just one, and no, it’s not the PR flak stealing a rapper’s Humvee and using it to crush a fleeing paparazzi whose camera is full of incriminating evidence. I heard a lot of tales, some more believable than others, but none involved a lot of murder and mayhem, so they didn’t really fit with the chaotic narrative I was assembling.
However, I based quite a bit on the people who’d told those tales: high-strung publicists, avuncular but vaguely threatening lawyers, creepers who saw themselves as fixers, B-movie actors happy to be killed in horror movie after horror movie if it meant they still had a shot at a bigger role at some point. Their mannerisms, the compromises they made in their professional and personal lives, all ended up woven into the DNA of my characters.
(Stephen King once wrote, “It is the tale, not he who tells it,” but there’s a bit of a contrapositive there: sometimes the person telling the tale, and the environment in which they’re telling it, is more valuable than the details of their story. Especially if you’re a writer trying to create a believable atmosphere.)
If there’s one thing I ported directly from real life (whatever that term actually means) to fiction, it’s the locations. The magnificent house where a movie star is gunned down at the beginning of the book, the Santa Monica castle where a PR master lives in drunken exile, the winery where a whole bunch of evil skullduggery may have taken place—those are all transported without much change, because why not? The chances of you figuring out those addresses are slim.
I imagine that writers of virtually every genre, from cop mystery to espionage thriller, wrestle with how to effectively convert reality into fiction. I’m thinking in this moment of authors like Alma Katsu and her spy novels, or Michael Connelly with his Bosch books. There’s no “right” answer, of course—both real life and fiction are messy, and the lines between them are usually blurred.
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